THE HAMMER

The transformative potential of organized labor.

Labor journalist Nolan makes his book debut with a rousing look at union activities across the country and an impassioned argument for the protection of workers’ rights. Noting the small percentage of unionized workers in America, the author emphasizes the correlation between the decades-long decline in union membership and the commensurate increase in inequality. “Even in the bluest and most union-friendly states in the country,” he writes, “less than a quarter of working people are union members.” Many states—South Carolina, for one—are openly hostile to unions. In Las Vegas, the casino industry has continued to try to break the work of the Culinary Union, whose 60,000 members include housekeepers, porters, food servers, and cooks. In California, child care workers joined with domestic workers and school support staff to unionize. “A union,” Nolan reports, “does not need to arise out of a single group of workers who come to the same building every day and get paid by the same company. A union can be made from any coherent group of working people with a common interest—even if they are spread across a thousand miles of distance and work individually out of their homes and are not allowed to be a union, according to the current law.” Hospitality workers in Miami, fast food workers in West Virginia, Nabisco employees in Portland, Oregon, and graduate students at Yale all serve as examples of successful efforts to unionize, even as they fight resistance from recalcitrant bosses. Nolan interweaves his investigation of particular unions with a profile of Sara Nelson, a tireless union leader who became head of the Association of Flight Attendants in 2014 and emerged as a forceful spokesperson for workers’ rights. United labor, he writes, has the power to change the economic, social, and political landscape.

Spirited reporting on workers’ lives.